Witness for Westmoreland

This deponent has to confess to a deplorable incapacity to avoid returning to the Westmoreland libel trial taking place in Manhattan day after day. Perhaps there are addicts of the ironic occasion as there are of heroin. Otherwise how am I to explain, let alone excuse, an obsession with a suit which General William C. Westmoreland undertook against CBS to prove that he is an honest man, and which he may very well lose because the jury thinks that he is one and that his supporting witnesses are not?

There is no way to say whether former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s appearance in early December was of much service to Westmoreland’s reputation for truth, because McNamara plunged so distractingly into doing damage to his own.

As secretary of defense and our senior authority on the Vietnam War’s progress, he was a public optimist and a private pessimist. Sometimes hints of his private self crept forth from that interior conflict, but in general he maintained the posture of someone who believed that the war was being won, even though he had lost hope of a military victory no later than 1966.

And yet in October 1967, at a press conference when he was pushed to the wall by questions of whether the war had degenerated to stalemate, he answered, “I don’t know of a qualified military observer who believes it is a stalemate.” At the trial David Boies, counsel for the defendant, Columbia Broadcasting System, asked McNamara to explain this flat denial of what was by then a fixed conviction.

McNamara replied that he had been speaking of qualified military observers, which presumably excluded him as only a qualified civilian. He had made one of those fine distinctions unlikely to be caught on the wing, and his auditors understandably reported the next day that the secretary of defense had dismissed any suggestion that the war was at stalemate.

McNamara insisted that he had met the standards of public candor because he had not really thought the war was a stalemate; he was only sure it could not be won. He wished defense counsel “would not put words in my mouth.” It was noticed that the audience had begun to snicker; perhaps he too noticed that it had, because he observed, rather out of the blue, that there is “a hairline difference” between a no-win and a stalemate condition.

There was, in any case, small cause to doubt that Robert McNamara had arrived at a realistic assessment and then dutifully, if sometimes hollowly, blown the smoke of official fantasy whenever his forum was a public one. The mystery was why he refused to avail himself of an explanation entitled to intellectual respect.

From 1966 until President Lyndon Johnson cut him loose early in 1968, he had been telling the White House that the national security adviser, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Westmoreland were wrong in their estimate of the war’s progress.

Purchase a trial Online Edition subscription and receive unlimited access for one week to all the content on nybooks.com.

If you already have one of these subscriptions, please be sure you are logged in to your nybooks.com account. If you subscribe to the print edition, you may also need to link your web site account to your print subscription. Click here to link your account services.